ren_bloom

[Thrud]

Please excuse the Noob nature of this question...

Where and how do I adjust this much spoken about setting to improve the performance of this game!

Clearly THIS IS the reason I suck so badly!

[Penguin2]

Please excuse the Noob nature of this question...

Where and how do I adjust this much spoken about setting to improve the performance of this game!

Clearly THIS IS the reason I suck so badly!

Open the console in game (its ' for me, might be ` or ~ according to other reports)

then type ren_bloom and hit enter

unfortunately you need to do this every game

[Thrud]

Aha.... that's great....

Thank you... I'll probably still lose... but at least it will be faster ;)

[vivaladan]

I've heard nothing of this, so in my ignorance, could you please evaluate what this actually does to get the "free" performance.

It looks like a feature swtich on the renderer, so by typing it are you turning it on? Bloom is a cheeper alturnative to HDR but then I didn't think that SupCom used HDR in the first place so by turning bloom on then arn't you loose performance? Doesn't make much sense to me.

[Freelance]

bloom and HDR have been caught up in the 3d buzzword bingo lately, but they're not the same thing.

bloom is where you look at a bright thing, next to a dark area and the light will bleed into the dark area on the screen (in sup comm, look at the green buildings that are queued up for construction, then disable ren_bloom, that's one example). High Dynamic Range rendering is often used with bloom (HL2) so it gets confused, it's actually the use of much higher accuracy colour information when rendering a frame. normal 32 bit colour is 8bits of integer information per colour (0-255 for red/green/blue/alpha), HDR uses floating point information (much larger range of values) and up to 32bits of information per colour channel. this allows much better quality rendering even before you add special effects

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_rendering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_%28shader_effect%29

[Quietus]

Regardless of that though, all of the ren_ settings are toggles and I haven't found any that are off by default, so ren_bloom turns off bloom and on a low-end PC (that plays supcom) it seems to double most people's framerates.